Broken Bonds

Amanda has been writing for about as long as she can remember.  She was always the kid walking around with a tattered old binder of her poetry.  She used to ride her bike around her block waiting for her muse to come and provide her with inspiration.  These days, daily life offers her plenty of inspiration, and she writes because it is the only way she knows how to make sense of the world.  Amanda is a stay at home mama to her two young girls, and she tries to fill their days with reading, loving, and creating.  She blogs about all of this and more at Indisposable Mama.  When she's not writing or spending time with her family, she can usually be found knitting crazy hats to photograph her children in.  Surely those photographs will be priceless in the years to come, either as reminders of fond memories or as great fodder for blackmail. Find more posts from her here.

How do you know when a relationship should be salvaged, and equally important, where do you draw the line between swallowing your pride and demeaning yourself?

For most of my life, I have always tried to do what was necessary in order to mend broken bonds.  My philosophy was that a relationship is more important than petty disagreements, and even if we have to swallow our pride a bit, it is worth it in order to maintain a meaningful relationship.

But I'm starting to question that theory.

See, for the second time in the last five years or so, I was asked to go against what I believe is right in order to maintain a relationship.  Both times I refused to cave, and both times, the other party did sever the relationship.

Upon looking back, it's difficult to regret these choices because I do not like who I would be had I made the opposite choices.  I do believe it is important to be humble in our dealings with other people, but I also believe that if we have to degrade and demean ourselves in order to be in a relationship then we are actually doing both parties more harm than good by playing along.

This last time, I finally stood up and said that I can't do it anymore.  I said that I am worth more.  I made it clear that I would be willing to mend bonds should the other party come half way, but I refused to sacrifice myself and my self worth in order to fix what maybe should stay broken.

And that decision has possibly been the most liberating decision of my life.  I look back on the words that I said when I informed the party that things weren't going to be fixed at my expense, and I get a sudden bolt of confidence.  I see myself as perhaps I should have all along -- as a person who is imperfect and flawed but who is still owed the respect that she shows to others.

I do look back wonder sometimes, but who am I?  Who am I to rough the waters?  Who am I to stand my ground?  Who am I to say I am worth more?

And my answer is that I am my girls' role model, and with that who am I NOT to do those things?

In hindsight, I look back on one of these relationships and I breathe a sigh of relief as I think, "good riddance."  With the other, I'm deeply saddened and hopeful that things will turn around.  But either way, I have been <em>blessed</em> with these relationships because through them, I learned who I was.  And that lesson is worth any heartbreak that learning it caused.

Hope

Amanda has been writing for about as long as she can remember.  She was always the kid walking around with a tattered old binder of her poetry.  She used to ride her bike around her block waiting for her muse to come and provide her with inspiration.  These days, daily life offers her plenty of inspiration, and she writes because it is the only way she knows how to make sense of the world.  Amanda is a stay at home mama to her two young girls, and she tries to fill their days with reading, loving, and creating.  She blogs about all of this and more at Indisposable Mama.  When she's not writing or spending time with her family, she can usually be found knitting crazy hats to photograph her children in.  Surely those photographs will be priceless in the years to come, either as reminders of fond memories or as great fodder for blackmail. Find more posts from her here.

I have been thinking a lot about hope lately.  When I look around me, there is so little of it to be found.  It seems almost as if people are afraid of hope.

If you listen to our political discourse (from both sides,) you will hear public figures talking about how the other side's options will never work.  If we elect the "wrong" people, our country will go downhill. If we make the wrong choice (and someone always thinks a choice is wrong,) we will end up in a land of despair.

We hear it when people talk about our society as a whole.  They will talk about how our cultural values are in the gutter and we are getting further and further away from some past ideal.  Hope isn't preached; instead we lament the present.

And in my house at least, my kids hear it too much in the way I speak about my life and the way I carry out my days.

Growing up, I was an eternal optimist.  I had a deeply held belief that things would work out for the best.  Even if something bad did happen, some other opportunity always came along that made things better.  I had an unlimited belief in the goodness of the world and in my own ability to capitalize on that goodness.

And then somewhere along the way it got lost.  I now find myself facing challenges and instead of hoping for and working for the best (or even just for the better,) I find myself wallowing in what is.  I don't take enough risks anymore.  I don't dare to believe that change is possible. 

In many ways, I am living a dream life right now staying home with my two little girls.  We spend our days how we want to, and every day I am bombarded with kisses and hugs and eyes that see the wonder in the world.  But as any stay at home mom will tell you, it's not all smiles and giggles.  The job also comes with a lot of fatigue, lost patience, and burn out. Good and bad though, I know without a doubt, I will mourn these days when they have past.

And so in honor of these days and the memories we are creating, I am going to work on bringing hope back into my home.  From here on out, I am making this affirmation on behalf of my family.

We believe in hope.

We believe in positive change.

We work to change that which we do not like.

We have confidence in our ability to make change happen, and we also trust in our ability to handle any hardships that come our way.  We are strong, and we are capable.

Always, we will look forward to the rainbow that follows the rain.

As with any change, our journey away from despair towards hope will take time and will be a bumpy road, but part of hope is not giving up.  And I won't give up because my children deserve to know that there is always a chance for things to get better as long as we are willing to fight for it.

Peace and worth

By Mandy.

About five or six years ago, someone asked me the following question, “Upon what do you base your sense of worth?”  I looked at him with a blank expression until it got uncomfortable for the both of us and he broke the silence with further comments.

But it is a very important question.  Perhaps it is one of the most important questions when it comes to our own feelings of peace and worth.  And it can also be a hard question if we don’t fully understand ourselves and our place in the world.

I don’t know about all of you, but for most of my life, I judged myself based upon what I did – tasks I accomplished, people I was kind to, selflessness I exhibited.  Self worth was something that I earned.  And for the most part, I was a decent person, and I earned it.

But the problem with earning our sense of self worth is that we can lose it.  When we make a mistake (as we all do very often) our whole sense of self and any prospect of peace can just fade away.  And our whole idea of worth can be eroded to almost nothing because of the countless number of mistakes, large and small, we all make in our lives.  It becomes a battle of what we pay most attention to -- the good or the bad -- and quite a few of us will choose the bad.

But I’m starting to seriously question the whole idea of earning our sense of worth.  The problem with it is that we can very easily lose all sense of worth.  If we make a massive mistake that at the time seems to override everything else, we can come to the conclusion that we are, indeed, worthless.

And I’m not sure that is something that is really something that should be possible.  Can a person ever actually be worthless, without any worth?  Are there any people who are worth more than others?

Of course, there are people who contribute to society more than others.  There are people who are kinder, gentler, and more selfless than others.  And there are people who just truly make abhorrent decisions on a regular basis.  According to most standards, we would say that some people are “better” than others, and by this, I think we are saying that those people are more capable of making decisions that benefit the larger good.  And that’s fine if that’s what you want to do.

But to say that some people are worth more in an overriding sense… that just doesn’t sit right for me intellectually or spiritually.

And based on that, I think we need to re-evaluate what we base our opinions of ourselves on.  Should our worth be based upon our decisions?  What else is out there that could provide a more accurate determination of our worth?  Do you truly believe that your worth is inherent in your humanity, and if so, how could you change your opinions about yourself to be more in line with that belief?

Embrace Imperfection

Mandy.

I would like to start off by saying that I am really excited to be writing my first Embrace Your Life post.
I think the ladies here have done an excellent job of creating a blog that has an opportunity to touch
people’s lives for the better, and I am very honored to be a part of it.

I’ve been thinking over the last few days about what I would write about in this first post, and I went
back to the theme of the blog – embrace your life – and I started to think about the parts of ourselves
that are perhaps the hardest to embrace: our imperfections.

I’ve mentioned on my own blog that I suffer off and on from depression. I never quite know when it will
hit me, but it’s always very similar in its attack. I will go through the day with blinders on. As I get out
of bed to walk into my girls’ room to greet them for the day, I don’t see their smiling faces or their joy at
my presence. I see the clothes on the floor that I didn’t clean up last night, the dust on the shelves, and
the fact that it took me a couple of minutes to get in there this morning. I see all of this, and I call myself
horrible names, and I start going to extreme places with my thoughts of how bad of a mother I am. This
just creates a snowball that gets worse as the day progresses.

As I said, I suffer from depression, so I am very good at these mental leaps, but depressed or not,
mother or not, I think we all go through this often in our lives perhaps even more than we realize. We
can be surrounded by our successes, receiving praise at every turn, and yet the voices that ring the
loudest in our minds are of the failures.

I’m sure we all have different reasons as to why we let the bad become so prominent in our thoughts.
But the problem isn’t recognizing our faults. The problem is when they get out of perspective. The
problem is when we let them define who we are.

I realized last week that the reason why these thoughts are so troubling to me is because I feel like they
are failures. I guess somewhere deep inside I believe I should be the perfect person – perfect mom,
wife, employee, homemaker, writer… And so whenever I make a mistake, I feel like the universe has
fallen off orbit, and there is something fundamentally wrong. As much as I understand that perfection is
not possible, I still berate myself for not being able to achieve it.

And then yesterday, I told myself that these imperfections are just proof of my humanity. We are all
imperfect, and we all make mistakes every day. We can rage against them and hate ourselves for them,
or we can embrace them as proof of a fundamental truth: we are imperfect. In a backwards sort of way,
the more I started to embrace the label of imperfect, the more okay I felt with myself.

This doesn’t mean ignoring mistakes and relishing in them, but it means accepting them as part of our
lives and ourselves. If we accept them, we can recognize them in peace, and if we are in peace, then we
can make some progress.

Fallibility is part of our nature. We have absolutely no choice in it. And this fallibility will impact all
areas of our lives. If we choose to ignore it or try to eliminate it, we are fighting against an opponent
that we can never beat, and that opponent is human nature. Instead, we need to accept imperfections
and embrace them just as we accept and embrace the faults in our loved ones.

Embracing life means embracing it all, warts and all. And for me at least, when I am able to do that, I am
finally able to find some peace.

And so I say to myself and to all of you, “I am imperfect, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about
it.” And wow that feels good!